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Part XIII — Expert Mode: Systems, Agents, and Automation/37. Agentic Workflows (Without Letting It Run Wild)/37.1 What an "agent" is in practice
37.1 What an "agent" is in practice
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The ReAct Loop
ReAct (Reason + Act) is the fundamental loop of agents. 1. **Observation:** "I see a file named `data.csv`." 2. **Thought:** "I should read the first 5 lines to understand the columns." 3. **Action:** `read_file("data.csv", lines=5)` 4. **Observation:** "The columns are: id, name, email." 5. **Thought:** "Now I can answer the user's question."
State Management
An agent is just a script that maintains a list of messages (the "scratchpad"). Every time it takes an action, the result is appended to the scratchpad. This context grows until the task is done or the window is full.